A small smile played on his face as he stepped out of the Santa Barbara Police Department. He wasn't sure if it was the momentary shock of actually turning down the job that Chief Vick had offered, but whatever it was it felt damn good.  For the first time since he retired, Henry Spencer felt at peace.

Don't get him wrong, he wanted to take that job - god, did he want it - but in the back of his mind he knew that Shawn would never forgive him. And things were going so great with his son at the moment. It was as if they were finally a true family. Well, ‘true family' in the dysfunctional fight-every-time-we-talk-and-always-criticize-each-other sort of way. It worked for them, though, and they had never had such a vast improvement on their relationship that Henry could remember.

However, if he took the job he knew that would be the end of four years worth of the mending that had started to take place. And yes, he liked working on cases again; reading over the files, gathering evidence and clues, the wheels turning as each piece of the jigsaw finally snapped together. He loved the feeling the adrenaline gave him as it slithered around in his veins, pumping and racing throughout his entire being. But now it all somehow seemed empty without Shawn.

Ok, maybe the job did entitle him to ‘oversee' all outside resources, which included his son (and his son's best friend). But it was the fact that Shawn called him that made it so worth-while. Shawn wanted to work the case with him. If he had taken the job, Shawn would have done everything in his power to make sure Henry was excluded from whatever case he was working on. Shawn would have refused to work with him - that was something Henry refused to let happen. He had his son back, and that was a million times better than any job the Chief could have offered. His job now was to finally be the father he had never let himself be before - just with a little tough love added in the mix.

Of course, he would never say any of this out loud. ‘Feelings' was a foreign subject to the Spencer men; a grunt and a beer was what ‘feelings' tended to amount to. Anything more than that was a territory never to be explored by father and son.

Off the record, though?  He was beyond proud of his son. Shawn's abilities had successfully exceeded all of his own, taking on a form of their own that had even started to scare Henry - in a good way.

Besides, Henry had his moment. This was Shawn's time to shine, and he's be damned if he'd let anyone - including himself - take that away from his son.